Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way) - Roma Agrawal
“Even as I thought about larger and more complex objects - diggers, skyscrapers, factories, tunnels, electrical grids, cars, satellites, and so on - again and again, I came back to the same seven foundational innovations. We join things together: the nail. We need something that rotates or revolves: the wheel. We need power, and technology that can store it: batteries, sure, but more fundamentally, the spring…”
Smartphones, skyscrapers, space ships. Modern technologies can seem dizzyingly complex. But beneath the surface, they can be beautifully simple. In the book Nuts and Bolts, award-winning engineer and Shard host Roma Agrawal breaks down our most complex technical achievements into seven basic inventions: the nail, the spring, the wheel, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump. Each of these items is a marvel of design in its own right, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build great things, communicate over great distances, and even escape our planet. Roma traces the surprising journeys of each invention through millennia and reveals how handcrafted Roman nails led to modern skyscrapers, how the potter’s wheel enabled space exploration, and how humble lenses helped conceive a child against the odds. She invites us to admire these small, but perfectly formed inventions, and shares with us stories of remarkable and often unknown scientists and engineers who made them possible. The nuts and bolts that make up our world may be tiny and often hidden, but they have dramatically changed our lives.
